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Saturday January 12, 2013 8:04 AM

While on my Christmas break from college, I took a walk at dusk amid the snow-covered wolds and
wealds on my family’s Knox County farm.

In those two hours alone, I found that I thought much more than I do during a typical semester
at school.

Whether that’s more an impugnation of academia or a tribute to solitary walks, I am unsure. I
will pursue the latter, as the former threatens to debase a significant investment of mine.

I have said I was alone, but I retract that: I was accompanied by the family dog, a mottled
Australian shepherd.

Taciturn and ever faithful, she busied herself with snow and deer in distant spinneys as I
stared ahead in pensiveness. A dog, I reflected, affords the solitary walker all the virtues of
companionship without any of the vices.A black tupelo graces the most salient and noble hill on the
land. As I walked beneath its boughs, tightening my hood against a bitter wind, I recalled a
pleasant autumn afternoon years earlier during which my father and I took a nap under them. The
tree had grown into a flame of crisp red that filtered the sunlight into a cheery crimson. An ice
storm had stripped the tree of its largest branches, felling them onto the snow below. Still, the
tree stood against the darkening winter sky.

Down the hill stood my home for as many years as I can remember, and beyond it lay farm fields
asleep underneath a mantle of snow.

They are tired, I thought, from the fruitful summer.

I looked about me — at the hills that make the valley, at the creek that winds its way through
it and at the quiet brook behind my house that joins the creek farther down the vale.

I thought about how goodness pervades the valley; how many places in the world might be more
grand and breathtaking and yet few, I was quite sure, are so humbly sublime.

I left the hilltop in a bounding run through the deep snow, laughing as I ran, for the moment
seemed childish and the world vast. Reaching the forest’s edge, I grew quiet as a sylvan respect
overtook me, as if every tree standing silently in the wind were Yggdrasil, the great ash tree of
Norse mythology.

I felt far from home, although it lay just over the hill.

Another incline — once familiar but new and uncharted again — compelled me to vault trees felled
by forgotten winds. I climbed a few limbs to peer down into our neighbors’ fields.

I have friends and acquaintances who spent the holidays in much warmer and more exotic climes.
Once back inside, I told myself, I will see pictures online of beaches and Roman colonnades, azure
waters and the Pantheon.

For all their worldly travels, though, they won’t have visited a place so grand and arcane as I
have in traipsing into the snow-laden world behind my home.

As I stood on a log, looking out at a contented valley and the wisps of chimney smoke emerging
from the snug homes owned by good people, the air grew cold. Still, I wasn’t ready to return.

I had found this other place, within home and beyond it, too magical for words.

Matthew Eley, 20, will return to classes on Monday at the University of Richmond in
Virginia.